“But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day”.
Shakespeare is everywhere during the Fringe and EIF, his works performed, recast, reinterpreted and rehashed in every conceivable way, but it’s unique to find him at home.
But here he is, and to be fair looking a little worse for wear, stooped over his desk, quill scratching as he tries to finish a job of writing for Burbage.
It’s cold as hell and there is such a knocking in his head, a thousand instruments twanging in his ears, but it was a good night he confides. He has been out drinking heavily with his London writing friends Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton, a pursuit that promotes three things: nose painting, urine and sleep. Oh, and desire, both to stand to and not be able to stand to, as he teases an audience member about his carousing with a French girl.
And so, he mixes his life in Stratford-upon-Avon and London with his plays showing how one might have inspired the other as he woos the audience (poetry goes down well with women of a certain age he advises), ponders The Seven Ages of Man and almost reveals his exotic muse, The Lady of the Dark Sonnets.
He is not one to allow truth to get in the way of a good story. The skill of a writer is to make the audience do what they want, to use imagination, “my words, your brain”. The idea here, he states, is that he performs one of his greatest hits and the audience claps. But imagine these seen fresh and thrilling he encourages, the plots and words unknown.
There are many facts we don’t know, not when he was born or died or what he looked like (although he prefers the young and virile Cobbe portrait), and he is surprised that 400 years on he is an industry, studies examining how many commas or thees or thous he used.
Despite being credited with making up hundreds of new words they don’t come easily. Not above stealing ideas, moreover we see him setting scenes and gathering workshopped devised material into scripts. He delivers some beautiful lines before disgruntledly revealing that they are by “bloody Ben Johnston” or Marlowe.
Pip Utton moves expertly between light and amusingly conversational to dramatic as when he melds the heart breaking “Good Night Sweet Prince” with the death of Shakespeare’s own young son, Hamnet. “Do not applaud my grief”.
It’s slick stuff, showing us both the mechanics and magic of theatre and leaving us to speculate on the truth of its novel ending.
Show times: 20 to 26 August 2024 at 1.10pm.
Tickets: £11 (£10) to £12 (£11) (Family £10.25 - £11.25).
Suitability: 12+ (Contains audience participation).